John Morrison: Just for starters, can y’all tell me how you all came together? I know y’all’s music in separate projects, but how did y’all come together as a band in this iteration?

Shayna Dulberger: Keir called me, I think. He was like, “do you wanna play a show with Julius?” I bet we all have different stories.

Keir Neiringer: That was 2014.

SD: So it’s been like, we play a few gigs a year and it’s always great. It’s really energetic, but it’s also like, it just feels like a really accepting environment, like a real safe space to like go in and it’s just so much fun.

Alex Smith: I think I played with y’all like three or four years ago during the height of [Philly science fiction event series] Metropolarity. And the reason why I know that is because a lot of what I was reading from during that performance, a few stories that I just published in a Metropolarity zine. Keir asked me to toast and MC with y’all that one time. It was a Fire Museum show at that kind of funky little church in Northern Liberties area. And that was my first time really colluding with the Dromedaries as far as like, live performance. I had done a couple of bios for y’all. I knew Julius and Keir separate from Dromedaries.

I remember being super nervous ’cause this was only the second time I’d ever really done any sort of jazz-related or avant-garde-related… kind of like freestyling off the top of the head/reading poetry kind of thing. Normally, I had done punk rock [in the bands Solarized and Rainbow Crimes] and of course, some freestyling in cyphers and stuff. But mostly the stuff I’d done on stage was punk rock. So this was like very new to me.

KN: That [first Fire Museum] show was like height of the pandemic….masks on for most people. And maybe my first show back in Philly after the Pandemic, ’cause I had moved away in the summer of 2020. But I think basically Julius and I had played together since 2012 and had a thing. I think either we were playing a duo set when Shayna’s quartet played in Philly in 2013, 2 14. And that’s when I knew Shayna beyond just, just your name. I actually heard you play.

SD: That was my quartet tour. I wrote all this music and I put out a record and I went on tour. Keir saw me, like my, my heart. It wasn’t just like some gig, you know what I mean? So, it was nice to connect again because of that too, ’cause sometimes I get calls for a gig and I’m like, “what do they want from me? What do I do?” But this is like the real me.

JM: So, y’all are together, you play this live set. Was the thought always to do an album? Or were y’all thinking like,” oh, we’ll just keep this as something that exists live?”

KN: I think it was time for us to record and we wanted to just commit like another collectively improvised studio recording. Like Alex said, he had written, written us up, both as a commission for our first tape that we did with Already Dead tapes. And then reviewed us on the second record that we did for Relative Pitch. When we were we were gonna go into the studio, it was unanimous. I think Shayna, it was your suggestion first, “let’s call Alex.” And Julius and I were like, “that is a good idea.” And we did do a session as just a trio in the studio before Alex showed up that day, and that material exists somewhere, but I think we were also pretty unanimous about it that Alex is the shit.

JM: Since this is such a unique, such a specific sound and experience musically, how have folks been responding to y’all?

KN: Well, we’ve had some nice reviews here and there. I think mostly from like European sites so far. Since the record came out, we played the one gig in Philly [1/30 at Solar Myth]. We got a lot of very positive feedback. People were moved, people were into it, people were pushed, you know? It transported people.

Julius Masri: People who I’ve never met before walked up to me and said how much they loved it. So I’m like, “cool.”

AS: That’s always the barometer. With people that you’ve known for like 8 million years, they’re just like, “great set, man…it’s really good, man.”

JM: “You did it again!”

AS: Right, right, right. “You did it again.”

KN: It’s so reference rich, it’s so thick. You can listen to the record or listen to a track and follow one musician’s strand through the track and just sort of hear it through their ears. I think to kind of throw a political sense to it: We can be playing together and I will not get all of Alex’s references or all of Shayna and Julius’ references. I will throw things in and not have certainty that everyone is like capturing exactly where that comes from. And I think being comfortable with uncertainty is a political stance. And I’ve really enjoyed going back and listening to the record and being like, “wait, what was Alex talking about there?”

Julius and I talk all the time about the difference and being on the right side between like cultural appropriation and influence with the things that we take in and then spitting it out and, and offering it up, um, as something that we’re trying to participate in. And I think for how people could receive it, they can receive it with that depth where it’s not a very specific and narrow idiom, but it’s like, it’s like a, it’s a door and a portal in some way. If you’re, if you’re comfortable with not knowing right off the bat.

JM: I think also, especially when we were working with different musicians, like with Dromedaries, everybody has their full on personal cosmology, which is just immense. And with a group like this, you’re kind of creating a space for people to put down what they need to put down, explore what they need to explore. And like Keir said, you are not gonna necessarily understand where everyone’s coming from a hundred percent, but that’s okay. That is part of the charm, I guess. But also just part of the experience. There’s tons of music out there where you know exactly what’s gonna happen. You could basically just time it down to the second, like, “oh, okay, we understand where this is going.” If you’ve spent years playing with so many amazing improv people, you’re just comfortable in improvising without necessarily having any sort of safety net with the exception of whatever skillset that you have.

JM: Since we’re talking about playing together, I did want to ask you about the actual process of playing together and, and making this record. Walk me through the recording, what you’re hearing, and how a composition comes together.

JM: I feel like we came in with the option of trying out different things and we had our own little personal, musical babies that were like, all right, let’s see what we can do here. And then we just sort of built from there. God, it feels, the recording feels like it was done like 20 years ago, even though, though that’s not the case. It was definitely a lot very open improvisation and experimentation.

SD: I think we communicated a bit, for maybe like the month before. We just communicated what sounds we wanted to explore and what our setups would be like. Julius was like, I wanna bring my synthesizers and Keir had like a suitcase of percussion, so I decided to bring some of my pedals too. So I think one of the tracks we decided to go a little more noise in the direction of noise improv. And then other tracks I think were more like free-jazz. We always had those other tools since we all knew we were interested in exploring more sounds than just our main axes.

KN: I think it’s worth mentioning also that we weren’t familiar with Alex’s texts. So. we were all improvising to fresh texts, and Alex was applying those texts, that were written or freestyled to music that you didn’t know. The other thing I wanted to say about the day of recording the record is I wanna shout out Rittenhouse Sound Works, because that place is a really inspiring place to be making music. The room sounds beautiful, gorgeous, gorgeous out of space. We’re in the Germantown, Mount Airy area and our engineer Mike Richelle was just really accommodating. So when you get to be in a space and you’re not stressed about the space and you’re not stressed about like, the tech, and you just feel comfortable that that has a lot to do with what kind of music you’re gonna make. It felt good making the music.

JM: I remember we all pulled into the parking lot at the very same time, traveling from different places. That was kind of funny.

JM: That’s a sign right there.

KN: It’s worth mentioning here, in terms of the way the tracks are distinct from each other. Each track will have like maybe a zone where one of us kind of focused, right? So, if Julius is bent over his electronic suitcase, that’s gonna be a different focus than if he starts like going at like the double bass drum business. And I think one of the strengths of the record is it’s free improvisation that bears repeat listening. I wanna return to like Alex’s stories on any given track, like again and again. And like, even though I know the narrative pathway, I wanna be on that pathway again, like watching a favorite episode of some show or reading a favorite comic book again.

AS: We did mini huddles right before we played, I think like a very tiny meeting of the minds, and then we just kind of went and played, which is like really amazing. I wrote like half the lyrics like in the studio, With this record, I wrote half of it and it just kinda just exploded out of me. And it was nice to sort of have a general idea of what I wanted to do, but then after playing and listening to the music, and getting more and more comfortable with each thing we did. Having new characters pop into my head and new ideas and new designs, it was great. It was definitely very unique to how I normally record. And I got to flex a little bit, so that was kind of fun too.

JM: What are y’all doing next? Y’all have like, live gigs, you gonna make another record?

JM: We’re definitely trying to string together some shows soon.

KN: We wanna play. We’re all busy. We live in three different cities and got different commitments and obligations. But we are going to play some shows around at least regionally in the year to come. We’re just, we’re just ironing out the details at the moment.

Bartees Strange: WXPN Winter Sessions